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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24472162">Learn How To Be You In Time</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/MauveCat/pseuds/MauveCat'>MauveCat</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Family Snapshots [9]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Endless Summer (Visual Novel)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Family Feels, Gen</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-05-31</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-05-31</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-04 02:15:03</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,733</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24472162</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/MauveCat/pseuds/MauveCat</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Zahra is on the hunt.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Family Snapshots [9]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1729411</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>4</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>4</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Learn How To Be You In Time</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Shaking the cold rain off her jacket, Zahra glanced at the bored clerk behind the counter. The bookstore was practically empty – not surprising because who bought actual books these days, let alone old books that weren't even important enough to be in print? Same as the three stores she'd visited already, none of which could be bothered to put their inventories online. Downloads weren't the future anymore, downloads were <em>it.</em><span> Books – physical paper books – were old-fashioned and inconvenient. Who read them except old people? People who were afraid of the future, people who were clinging to the past. </span></p><p>And... stupid friends who read a stupid book in their stupid adolescence, and couldn't stop talking about what a stupid crime it was that it went out of print and wasn't important enough to be digitized. Okay, maybe Diego didn't really talk about it a lot. Maybe he only mentioned it a few times in their last phone call. Or maybe it was just one time he mentioned it. Anyway, stupid book that was older than either of them, and stupid Diego and his stupid birthday. And stupid online resellers who wanted a shitload of money for a decent copy that wouldn't even get delivered until after Jake left on his upcoming La Huerta run next week.</p><p>
  <span>When the hell did she turn into the kind of person who put any kind of thought into birthday gifts? Nothing wrong with gift cards. Gift cards were fucking </span>
  <em>amazing.</em>
  <span> But Elyys'tel didn't have a lot of places to use gift cards (what kind of gift card would Gurgi take? a shiny rock or maybe a dried up bug?</span>
  <em>)</em>
  <span> so it wasn't like she had a whole lot of options.</span>
</p><p>And when did she turn into the kind of person who even remembered when a friend's birthday was, much less went out in a cold spring rain to try to find some stupid old book?</p><p>When did she turn into the kind of person who had friends?</p><p>Zahra wandered the aisles, trying to understand the layout. No pattern or logic that she could see. Poetry next to cookbooks, cookbooks next to... math books? Here was a section with old art prints... hey, sheet music! Cheering up, she began sifting through the pages; maybe there was something that she and her band could cover.</p><p>When she'd found a half-dozen possibilities – this motorcycle song might work the best, “shotgun blast to his chest left nothing inside” would be fun to scream – she went back to searching. Aaaand... now she was in fiction. Who designed this place, Doctor Who? Was she gonna find a minotaur in the middle of the store?</p><p>Sighing, she idly glanced at the books nearest her, running a finger along the spines. Norris, Niven, Niffenegger – what kind of dumbass name was that, sounded straight out of Dr. Seuss – Nesbo, Namazi... <em>Namazi.</em></p><p>Zahra's finger and heart stopped. Farzad Namazi. <em>Nowhere You Can Be.</em> The only one of his books that ever got translated from Farsi to English. Published in 1992, underground, like all of the books he wrote in Iran. Translated into English in early 1997, right after his daring escape from Tehran with his engineer wife – Farzad and Mahtab, celebrities for a few months before the media got bored with the story, along with their baby daughter. Damned cute little thing. Zahra had seen the pictures in the microfilmed newspapers she looked up. Big eyes, dark and frightened. Someone had stuck a Minnie Mouse hat on her. Welcome to America, little Zahra.</p><p>Sometimes Zahra thought she remembered them, remembered herself the way she used to be. Probably just wishful thinking, but every now and then she seemed to remember being snuggled against a strong shoulder, or a gentle hand rubbing her back and singing her to sleep. It had to be wishful thinking. Three-year-olds didn't form reliable memories.</p><p>She remembered their absence, though. “Sudden disappearance,” those newspaper articles said. Speculation of all kinds – were they on the run? Did the Iranian secret police track them down? Had they un-defected and gone back to Tehran? That last one had been a popular theory at first, but when a few months went by and there wasn't a triumphant press conference with the Ayatollah and his prodigal lambs, the newspapers gave up on it.</p><p>Zahra never expressed an opinion out loud but privately, once she began to understand her Tragic Story (capitalizing it helped. Turning it into a trope, into a cliché – that made it someone else's story and then it was easier to keep it at a distance), she kind of hoped her parents had done the smart thing and ran away. You can't go on the lam with a toddler. She liked to imagine them on a beach in Puerto Vallarta, wearing sunglasses and sipping fruity drinks with umbrellas and holding hands and laughing, perfectly happy without her. That was easier to endure than imagining them tortured, suffering, dead and lost forever.</p><p>And really, she got off easy when it came to foster care. She'd heard the horror stories – hard to escape hearing them from the other kids who passed through the home where she somehow managed to spend fourteen years. Any way you look at it, she was lucky. Maybe she didn't get much in the way of affection, but she got nothing in the way of abuse, either. Sure, there was her twelfth birthday when her latest social worker gave her a hug and a gift, and then pulled back in confusion when Zahra stood stiff and confused in her arms, not sure what to do with either the gift or the hug. Could have been worse. She ate every day, and she was never cold or bruised or used.</p><p>She just wasn't wanted.</p><p>Zahra looked down at the book in her hand, at the blue and green ocean waves on the cover. Reluctantly, she turned it over... her father. Black and white photo, of course, just like the ones she'd seen on the microfilm. He had kind, hopeful eyes and a beard.</p><p>
  <em>it scratched against her cheek as he danced her around the sunny yellow room and sang about an octopus's garden, and Mama tried not to laugh when Baba pulled her in to sway with them and she said it's far too late for nonsense, Zaza needs to be in bed, doesn't your big-girl bed look warm, my beautiful Zaza</em>
</p><p>No one ever told her her father was a writer, of course, or that her mother published engineering studies in three languages. No one in the foster system cared about that so she didn't find out until she got to college. She aged out of the system and everyone figured she'd be another statistic stuck flipping burgers for the rest of her life (if she was lucky), but somehow her grades got her a few scholarships to decent schools, and her last social worker helped her apply for loans to cover the rest. She'd learned the value of camouflage by then – dyeing her brown hair a few shades lighter, wearing conservative good-girl clothes. Don't talk about Warcraft because girls don't game. Don't complain, don't swear, don't make jokes (because all three made people feel like they weren't in charge). Follow the rules so they won't pass you along to another home where things were worse. By her late teens, she had it all figured out and when she got to Hartfeld she had a chance of fitting in. No one had to know she was nobody.</p><p>The freshman literature professor's eyes lit up when she saw the name on the class roster. <em>Like the writer? No... I think it's just a common Iranian name.</em> She'd been ignored for the rest of the semester, but Zahra was still grateful because that was when she learned how to research. That was how she found out her parents were real people. That was why she learned to dig, to hunt down things she wasn't supposed to know. Even if she never learned what happened to her parents, she learned how to find out other things.</p><p>She learned how to find anything she wanted.</p><p>Almost anything she wanted.</p><p>Of course, she'd already decided that she couldn't count on anyone. So when the big geeky (surprisingly weirdly sweet) Taiwanese kid (don't call him Chinese, he hates that) turned into a football hero, she was ready. He changed, so he was going to leave. Time to cut her losses before it hurt too bad.</p><p>
  <em>but it hurt, oh God how it hurt</em>
</p><p>And when her hacker collective started to run scared (they probably should have leveled up before going after a Russian oligarch), she was ready for that too. She made sure her tracks were covered first, of course. It was only self-interest that made her cover for the others while she was at it. If they got caught, they'd turn her in. Smarter in the long run to keep them all safe.</p><p>But somehow, keeping herself safe didn't matter quite as much as it used to. Or maybe it did but she was expanding her definition of safety. Maybe, just maybe, she wanted to let other people into her zone of protection. Maybe keeping them safe too mattered to her. Just a little bit.</p><p>Tucking her father's book underneath her sheet music, Zahra went back to the counter. She put her pile down and asked, “Do you have books about movies in this place?”</p><p>The clerk didn't look up from his book. Either it or he smelled like mildew. “Five aisles straight ahead, turn left, four more aisles, look against the north wall. General works first, then sections for genre, director, actor, or nation of origin. Sign fell down a few months ago so look where it used to be. You want anything in particular?”</p><p>“If you have it, I'll find it.” Somehow, the directions turned out to be right. Zahra scanned the crowded shelves, and then.... “Huh. Can't believe it.” She pulled a book off the shelf and examined it – cover in decent condition, no missing pages and it didn't smell like mildew – and she smiled slowly when she saw the front cover. Half-naked Charlton Heston. That was probably why Diego remembered it so fondly. She'd be sure to point that out the next time she saw him.</p><p>Never hurt to have something to tease her friends about.</p><p> </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>1. To the book lovers - don't worry, I'm one of you. I've worked in libraries for actual literal decades, so don't @ me.<br/>2. The title of both this story and the book Zahra's father wrote are from "All You Need Is Love" by the Beatles. He was a huge fan.<br/>3. As for the book I had Zahra hunt down: it's <i>The Hollywood History of the World</i> by George MacDonald Fraser. If you're at all interested in movies, it's definitely worth tracking down.<br/>4. And finally, the motorcycle song is "1952 Vincent Black Lightning" by Richard Thompson.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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